Quickly pressing a button after a light goes off is pretty unimpressive. Figuring out the answer to the question and measuring your confidence in order to decide whether to press the button is impressive.
Agree on your suspicion. Simply quartering the cost of memory and copying the approach from the paper with some home-grown improvements will get people ahead of IBM and probably inside IBM's decision loop so they're permanently ahead. But plowing something the first time is often the hardest. These weren't dumb people working on this thing for 3+ years.
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Quickly pressing a button after a light goes off is pretty unimpressive. Figuring out the answer to the question and measuring your confidence in order to decide whether to press the button is impressive.
Agree on your suspicion. Simply quartering the cost of memory and copying the approach from the paper with some home-grown improvements will get people ahead of IBM and probably inside IBM's decision loop so they're permanently ahead. But plowing something the first time is often the hardest. These weren't dumb people working on this thing for 3+ years.